By Elinor Mills, 4 October 2007 08:47
NEWS
Yahoo! is upgrading its Mail system with DomainKeys technology, to block phishing spam and other fraudulent emails that look like they come from eBay and PayPal but don't.
The DomainKeys system works by verifying the domain of the sender of the email, allowing ISPs to block messages they deem illegitimate.
The upgrade is expected to be accomplished globally over the next few weeks.
Typically, the phishing scams masquerade as emails from trusted financial sources and direct a recipient to a website where they're asked to enter their username and password. From there, their information is stolen.
Although most companies warn their customers that they won't send unsolicited emails asking for usernames and passwords, many people are still fooled. Blocking the scam emails before they hit in-boxes should cut down on the problem.
Elinor Mills writes for CNET News.com
Comments
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1. anonymous
Our trusted financial institutions help make phishing scams easier by not keeping to one consistent website or email address. They start with something like www.xyz.com but then onsite or in other uses it might change to www.personal.xyz.com or worse. This misleads customers into expecting a variable address.
Also emails are sent by these trusted companies as HTML emails not as plain ASCII text so real addresses are easily hidden. If all HTML email was filtered out it would make a good percent of phishing much more difficult.